My friend and I veered east on Highway 48 in northwestern Wisconsin as we headed for a July writers festival in my secondhand 1995 Geo Prizm, its metallic pale blue hood mottled with dark splotches as if decomposing. The previous owners, the nuns of Saint Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph, Minnesota, near where I live, had patched a hole in the front bumper with turquoise duct tape. I’d pulled it off, preferring the frank appearance of the puncture. A fringe of tape threads hung on and fluttered in the wind. The nuns had left a rosary in the glove box.
I’d named that car Subtle Power.
The day before the festival, my friend, a poet, had two teeth pulled and didn’t want to drive her somewhat better car because of the painkillers. She was working a factory temp job over the summer assembling insulin injector pens in rural Polk County. She had put the dentist’s bill on her credit card.
“I’ll have to work another couple weeks to pay it off,” she said. “School starts in a month, and then I’ll be tutoring again, up to $100 a day, as long as the students show up.” She’d left her adjunct teaching job and the long commute to the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire two years earlier and was now helping at-risk students with their coursework at the local high school.
The financial tightrope I walked was equally tenuous. I’d opened a simple artists retreat for the joy of it and to help manage taxes and upkeep on my property, a decrepit farmstead I’d purchased for a pittance and was fixing up little by little. I was lucky to own it outright. But so far, with the expense of building improvements and regulations coming at me from all directions, the retreat had cost more than it earned. I didn’t know how I was going to pay my annual insurance bill.
My friend and I both have MFAs in creative writing.
Before earning that terminal degree nearly twenty years earlier from the University of Minnesota, I worked as a newspaper reporter and editor, magazine editor, grant writer, and copywriter, as well as in public relations. The jobs were instructive, but more importantly they were a means to support my writing life. With the degree, I landed a teaching job at the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire at Barron County during a time when I really needed it. But I didn’t get my MFA to teach. I got it to learn the craft of writing. After five years I resigned, choosing to live frugally and accept certain risks to make my writing a priority.
I had authored one book, a memoir about home-based learning, published by a small press in 2008, and I had a substantial list of magazine publications, so I began offering occasional writing seminars through local schools, libraries, and community centers. I enjoyed them and the people who showed up, but the little money they brought in didn’t go far in paying the bills. I didn’t mind. Despite my experience and degrees, I’ve always considered myself in training for a life in creative writing.
I looked forward to the writers festival, where I had been invited to offer a craft talk and give a reading from my recent work. After a day of preparing I packed up copies of my book to sell, fliers of my upcoming seminars, my business cards, a card table, and two green-and-white webbed lawn chairs.
The air conditioning in my car was broken. We drove with all the windows down.
“The visibility is poor,” I said.
“I thought it was my painkillers,” my poet friend said.
“Dirty windshield maybe,” I said.
Though the humidity was high, I felt more desiccated by the minute. My friend needed water, so we stopped at an air-conditioned gas station. The thermometer on the wall outside read 97 degrees.
I cleaned the windshield inside and out, then realized it wasn’t the windshield but rather the saturated air that occluded the landscape. I waded through it after we pulled into the parking lot at the festival. The event organizer stood in the shade of a skimpy tree, his face glistening and a cape of perspiration darkening his pale blue button-down shirt.
The doors of the building where the opening ceremony would take place stood ajar. Heat and humidity rushed in. The lights were off. About thirty people had showed up, including a half dozen presenters. We sat and sweltered on metal folding chairs in the strange interior darkness. Thank God I’d worn jeans instead of a skirt. I hate when my butt sticks to a metal folding chair.
The organizer made a few remarks. Two poets read. No one turned on the lights or air-conditioning. I later learned the power was out.
My craft talk, scheduled to follow the opening ceremony, was one of several taking place at the same time. I hoped like heck I’d get a few participants. I did—three people. I led the way down the even dimmer corridor to my assigned room. It was locked. We stood beside it until the organizer jingled down the hallway with a ring of keys and let us in.
Afterward, my poet friend and I moved to the lawn in front of the main stage. Off to the side, pop-up awnings sagged where a dozen of us would be featured for stories and poems under the stars once the main-stage events were done. We would read our work, no mic, in what was intended to be a cozy setting.
We waited.
From the stage the director of the foundation that organized the festival made a fund-raising appeal to a scattered group of about fifty.
We waited again.
A local theater group performed a few scenes from their upcoming plays. In between, the sound guy wearing cutoff blue jeans, hiking boots, a tattered T-shirt, and a ponytail clomped across the stage, head down, moving microphones and then disappearing to the soundboard in the back. The recent winner of the Wisconsin Book Award read a compelling excerpt from his book. At dusk, right on schedule, the mosquitoes came out, and so did the writer of an up-north-at-the-cabin memoir whose reading ran over her allotted time by a full hour.
The minute she was finished, the sound guy turned up the volume on the loudspeakers and played “Diamond Girl” by Seals and Crofts. I stepped to the designated awning where I was billed with my poet friend. It was dark by then. I squinted at the page and considered the competing noise of “Diamond Girl.” I thought of asking the sound guy to turn it down, but no one else seemed bothered. I began reading. At that moment he turned off the music and vaulted onto the stage.
“Nothing!” he yelled, amplified by the mic.
I kept reading but more loudly.
“Nothing! Nothing!” he said again, his voice blasting through the four-foot speakers.
I paused.
He continued with the—what was it, a sound check?—his voice loud and clear, as if offering a postmodern performance.
I looked up, ready to quit.
“Keep going,” my friend said from the front row.
“Nothing. Nothing. Nothing,” the sound guy yelled all through my seven-minute reading.
My poet friend read next. By then the mosquitoes were so bad that most of the audience had left.
Off to one side the winner of the Wisconsin Book Award persevered under his awning, brushing mosquitoes from his bare arms and face, and from the looks of it, he sold five or ten books. The up-north-at-the-cabin memoirist had already scrambled away.
My friend and I folded our chairs and card table, packed up our books and materials, and headed toward my car. A man who’d attended my reading grabbed our webbed lawn chairs to help and followed along.
“This looks like a writer’s car,” he said as we loaded everything into the back seat.
The foundation director, who had been weaving through the crowd all evening, approached us. “Come back tomorrow. We’ll have beer and wine.”
“I had two teeth pulled yesterday and I’m on painkillers,” my friend said in response.
“Then whiskey for you,” the director said.
Once in the car, I turned to my friend and asked, “Do you need anything before we head back?”
“To never, ever hear any nostalgic writing about life before 1967,” she said, referring to the lake-cabin memoirist. “I can’t stand that syrupy crap.”
I drove north on Main Street, lit by vapor lights and steam from late afternoon rain, then west on a forty-mile stretch of rural road. Iridescent ground fog enwrapped us. It refracted headlights of the few oncoming cars—red, blue, orange—like radiant auras. The cars flowed toward us through the river of fog, the fog itself dreamy and soft. We slowed through Cumberland, the air even more saturated from the lakes surrounding it, and then McKinley, unincorporated. We could have been anywhere on any rural road in America. It was all the same within the immediate perpetual present—the flickering lines of yellow to the left and steady ribbon of white to the right. We drove with the windows half open and the defrost fan blowing through mile after mile of open space in our little island of Subtle Power.
We laughed lightly about the festival. We compared our work to that of affluent friends who’d taken their advanced or not-so-advanced degrees to the private sector. They had lake homes and shiny new cars and took extravagant vacations.
We didn’t think we were crazy, but we weren’t sure.
Making a sustainable living from creative writing is a long shot. Don’t quit your day job. I’ve heard that advice a hundred ways over the years, but I’ve never settled into it. When I had a day job, I ached to write.
On those fresh mornings leaving home for the newspaper office and a sixty-hour-a-week job, I walked to the car with a pang in my heart. I knew I wouldn’t get to my own writing until much later in the day, if at all, or on the weekends between covering the tractor pull at the county fair or photographing snowmobiles revving across the open water of a small lake at a local town celebration. As a magazine editor I’d squeezed the work into three long days so I could spend the rest of the week on my own writing. The university teaching job had offered a stable income, health insurance, and a retirement package, but I scraped to bring some energy to my family during those busy years and had nothing left for my own writing.
After I resigned, the exhaustion lifted. I had some savings to carry me for a while, and I settled into a frugal lifestyle. I was in my early fifties and single, and my youngest child would soon leave home. I maintained some intellectual engagement through writers conferences, critique groups, manuscript exchanges, and occasional online seminars. I purchased major medical insurance and hoped I wouldn’t need it. I wrote first thing in the morning, six hours a day, and felt deeply contented.
When other writers asked how I could afford to write, I replied, “Grow a big garden. Cut a big woodpile. Drive an old car.” All of which I did. It’s a little embarrassing on one level, because we do live in a society in which so much of one’s identity is tied to money and the shiny veneer it can buy. It helps that my expectations for material wealth are low since I’d grown up in a rural blue-collar family. Most days I like the active, practical labor of growing my own food and heating my own house while pursuing the creative, intellectual work of writing. The two modes complement each other. And I don’t conflate success and satisfaction in life with wealth and income. Still, the practicalities of life do require some cash.
“Being in the MFA program was the happiest time in my life,” my poet friend said, in the strobing light of cars whizzing past Subtle Power. She’d been a star in the program at the University of Minnesota and had since published a book and placed poems in dozens of journals.
“It was important to me,” I said.
But I wonder if it was important to me in the way it is to others. It didn’t pave the way for a lifelong career, though it could have. It did prepare me for several ways to make a living—teaching, editing, and writing of various kinds, none of them particularly creative. I do travel those roads at times, but for me creative writing is a calling that extends beyond a job or career, one that lasts throughout a lifetime. I don’t make much money from my creative writing. Not many writers do. But I’ve found something in writing that is even more valuable to me, and that’s a purpose.
The writers festival that foggy night was a chance, once again, to experience what it feels like to show up in public and be a writer. I have had truly rewarding experiences at public events, but I needed the writers festival that sweltering evening to remind me why I do what I do. It reminded me, strangely enough, of my purpose as a writer. Maybe it’s not to make a lot of money. Or to appear on a best-seller list. Or to attend swanky parties with celebrity authors.
Some of us are here to write, whether it’s honored or supported by society, and whether it’s paid or not. For me, and others like me, writing is the shimmering aura through which we see the world. It is the quiet and courageous act of creative expression that nourishes our souls. It is the subtle power that aligns us with ourselves. It is what we offer to others.
I’m not quite ready to go all Zen on this—or maybe I am. I’m in a peaceful striving mode. I write for understanding and connection. I write to make a life, if not a living.
I may not be flush with cash, and I may not have a capacity crowd waiting to hear me read my work, but that sound guy shouting “nothing” over my reading that night at the writers festival was wrong. I have everything I need and much more. Making tough choices to prioritize creative writing is not for everyone, but for me it’s a rich life.
I’ll figure out how to pay that insurance bill.
Kathleen Melin is the author of By Heart: A Mother’s Story of Children and Learning at Home (Clover Valley Press, 2008). Her writing has appeared in Split Rock Review, the Baltimore Review, Essay Daily, Barstow & Grand, and elsewhere. She lives on a farm in northwestern Wisconsin.
